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Cyber-criminals employing professional Captcha-crackers

According to the news from USA TODAY published on April 23, 2009, online crooks are hiring the services of groups of humans who crack Captcha, to clear a Captcha test.

The test, say security experts, lets the criminals to set up bogus social-network and e-mail accounts in massive bulks that are then used for various kinds of scam campaigns disseminated via instant messages and e-mail. However, cyber-criminals wanting to do this must first beat Captchas, the disfigured characters comprising alphabets and numbers that e-mail users or owners of social-network accounts need to enter to frame specific Internet forms.

Say the experts that for several years, the use of Captcha has prevented or foiled automated applications that create e-mail accounts to launch scams like fake anti-virus software and social website accounts to gather personal details of legitimate users.

However, according to them, Captcha-crackers work part by part usually from cyber cafes using online PCs based in Russia, China, Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and India, over long hours, figuring out series of characters that an-out-of-sight coordinator forwards.

Says director of emerging technologies Adam O'Donnell at Cloudmark a company for messaging security that a minimum of one ongoing, predominant operation has its source in Pakistan. Tennessean.com reported this on April 23, 2009. O'Donnell added, he suspects there could be similar operations running at any place where there is an Internet connection and inexpensive labor.

Furthermore, reports state that online crime-gangs characteristically compensate Captcha-crackers with no more than one penny for each Captcha code they fulfil, as per the advertisements for recruitment on the online hacker forums.

Moreover, the security specialists also stated that Captcha-crackers usually use the widely used social-networking websites. Nevertheless, according to Facebook and MySpace, thus far, the companies have put such attacks greatly under check. However, say security researchers that till the time Captchas continue to be a chief security system on social sites, Internet attacks against the latter would keep rising.

Says virus hunter Sergei Shevchenko at PC Tools, the security company that there should be no illusions about Captchas for, professionals desiring to crack them would do it anyway, reports Tennessean.com.

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